Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

The Business Intelligence ofthe Chicago White Sox

Organizations that use "business intelligence" (BI)
tools (and most do, to some degree, organized or otherwise) tend
to become "lumpy" in their strengths. They tend to
become much better where their BI tools and staff have high
aptitudes, and this makes their weaknesses appear even larger.

It's not that lumpy strengths make their
weaknesses worse (though it can happen...look at Enron's
brilliance at creative accounting and playing Wall Street and how
ultimately, it overwhelmed everything else in the organization to
the point it that this toolkit of simple tricks became the
corporate mission).

Anthony Giacalone recently produced for Baseball Primer a
sharp preview of this year's Chicago White Sox, and he
detected one of these BI tools making strengths lumpy trends in a
way that's illustrative for managers all kinds of organizations.
From his preview (emphasis mine):

(White Sox G.M. Ken)
Williams horrible beginning as a GM highlights his
shortcomings. Williams is just not a very astute
judge of major league talent. Sure, he can
understand that Bartolo Colon has a lot of ability but the
overwhelming majority of his major league acquisitions have
been failures. Basically, he has dumped major leaguers Keith
Foulke, Chad Bradford, Tony Graffanino, Chris Singleton, Mike
Sirotka, Kip Wells, Rocky Biddle, Jeff Liefer and Mark
Johnson for Bartolo Colon, Tom Gordon, Esteban Loaiza, Royce
Clayton, Juan Uribe, David Wells, Alan Embree, Jose Canseco,
Scott Schoeneweis, Roberto Alomar, Carl Everett, Todd
Ritchie, Cliff Politte, Armando Rios and Brian Daubach.
Anything pattern in these moves? For the most part the
players that he parted with were young and unproven while
those that he acquired were not only older but also had
established reputations.

Of all the major leaguers
that he has brought in, only Colon (trade), Loaiza (FA) and
Canseco (trade) have been successful to this point. But there
is another side of Kenny Williams' dealings. Under
Williams, the White Sox have been tremendously successful at
acquiring unproven and minor league talent.
Since Williams has taken over, the Sox have brought aboard
unproven players Willie Harris, Damaso Marte, DAngelo
Jimenez, Miguel Olivo, Mike Rivera, Jamie Burke, Ross Gload
and prospects Ryan Meaux, Enemencio Pacheco, Neal Cotts,
Felix Diaz, Ruddy Yan for very little. Thats not to say
that the White Sox wont occasionally decide to bring in
a bad player like Kelly Dransfeldt, but in sum thats an
impressive list. Further, not one single minor league player
that the White Sox have traded away has been successful in
the major leagues yet. In fact, in the last 10 years only Ron
Coomer and Josh Fogg have been traded away by the White Sox
and have later had any success at all. Thats a pretty
good record.

It just seems
very unlikely to me that a GM can be so bad at picking major
league players but so good at analyzing his own minor league
talent and acquiring it in other organizations.

Lumpy. Extra lumpy. A very high strength concurrent with a
very marked weakness.

What many people don't know, even in the sabermetric
community, is that the White Sox were an early adopter of
sabermetric methods. Manager Tony LaRussa and executive Jack
Gould embraced the STATS event-tracking technology around 1982,
according to Dick Cramer, one of the big brains behind it. That
organization didn't just run the system; they liked
analysis-support technology so much, Gould & G.M. Roland
Hemond had Cramer build them a custom scouting-support system.
Practical and logical: use technology where the benefit/cost
ratio of the status quo truly blows chunks, where the options are
so multitudinous that current systems are destined to get
overwhelmed, and where your competitors are unlikely to have the
proper cognitive underpinnings to follow so that your comparative
advantage can persist a while.

Where virtually everyone else was using whiteboards and index
cards, scouting the Mongol Horde of potential playing talent, the
Chisox applied special focus. And BI technology to back it up. (I
think you can see where the discussion is leading).

The White Sox, because they invested in this strength, appear
from the clear duality Giacalone brought to our attention, appear
to be really awful at at their weakness. And they may be
that awful, but it seems to me a majority of baseball
organizations make these apparently foolish decisions with
veteran players. I think, based on skimming through Retrosheet
transactions, the White Sox are little worse than anyone else at
their veteran-selection weakness, but that it looks worse because
this strength is such a counter-example.

BEYOND BASEBALL

It's a natural gravitational field. As an organization invests
resources (time, money congitive commitment) in one thing, it
reduces the resources available for other things (See Enron
example above) unless you're an organization like the Yankees
(mucho dinero, obsession with excellence).

Sometimes it's the technology that creates strengths or
weaknesses. Usually it's not. Usually it's the human talent
involved that makes this happen. Like Frank Thomas taking extra
batting practice when he really should be working on his footwork
in the field, it's easy to enter a cycle where you do something
well, get rewarded for it, and focus your resources in a narrow
way on what the organization is rewarding you for. It's a
universal temptation. I succumb to it myself; it's hard not to.

¿So what do you do about it?

I counsel organizations that do BI to run analyses not unlike
the one Giacalone did for the White Sox. What are you finding
out? Where are you successful with your BI? What are you really
bad at? Could BI you don't currently do if it magically was
perfect make any difference to that really bad attribute? And if
you threw investment at it, would you still be good (maybe not
quite as, but good still) at the BI you're good at now?

Preston's Law states if you want to improve your net
performance, it's generally much better to turn your '1's and
'2's into '5's and '6's rather than try to turn your '5's and
'6's into '8's. It makes sense mathematically, ecologically, and
in baseball, too.

Lumpy strengths & weaknesses may not just look
like a worse curse than they are. They might just be the limiting
factor that is both putting a ceiling on your organization's
success and that is relatively easy to break through.

I suspect that's the case for the Chisox.

3/31/2004 07:25:00 AM posted by j @ 3/31/2004 07:25:00 AM

Sunday, March 28, 2004

MoneylessBall: Where Bluster Passes Muster

A couple of regular readers have asked me to comment on today's
New York Times Magazine article (registration required) by Moneyball
author Michael Lewis on his high school baseball coach, "Coach
Fitz's Management Theory".

It's a lovely evocative piece. There's not much
management theory floating around its 8,000 words,
although there are stories from which you might sketch the
beginnings of a basis of a theory. I suspect Lewis did not write
the headline, but someone on the copy desk who had scanned it as
a proofreader was responsible (at dailies, it's pretty rare the
author gets her headline/title on an article).

If you read the piece, you'll get a real dose of New Orleans'
Newman School's now-controversial Billy Fitzgerald, a former
Athletics' prospect cut almost perfectly from the Dick
Williams cloth. I've written about Williams' management
techniques before,
and described the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.
Fitzgerald, like The Skipper, is an old-school guy who believes
everyone should try to do their best all the time and not
ruminate too much on failure, but look forward. I would call it a
bit of a Roman Catholic approach: you confess, get absolution in
exchange for a small amount of trouble that you can remember was
somewhat troublesome, and then just move on. Like Skipper,
Fitzgerald is a really smart guy (better read, it seems, than
Williams, who I never heard quoting Victor Frankl), and has a bad
temper that he can use as a weapon and generally knows when and
where to use as a technique to inspire his charges.

In moneyless ball, pre-college schooling environments, it may
be the single most probabilistically effective technique for a
baseball coach. The charges are pre-adolescents or adolescents,
chronically unfocused, riddled with fears of inadequacy
emulsified in a solution of arrogance and a belief in the self's
ultimate immortality and superiority. In baseball as a
income-generating profession, the approach has its limits,
because most pros are making significantly more money than the
coach, and in a society that worships money as its most frequent
measure of virtue, this makes adherence to the ultimate wisdom of
the coach a tricky proposition.

But for adolescents and immature adults (many of whom are
people you have to learn how to manage well), it can be a real
winner. Here's Lewis talking about having to relieve the team's
best pitcher because the opposing coach called Fitz on a rule
that normally wasn't enforced (the two-trips to the mound in the
same inning one) at this level.

Out of one side of his
mouth Fitz tore into the rule-book-carrying high-school coach
-- who scurried, ratlike, back to the safety of his seat; out
of the other he shouted at me to warm up. The ballpark was
already in an uproar, but the sight of me (I resembled a
scoop of vanilla ice cream with four pickup sticks jutting
out from it) sent their side into spasms of delight. I
represented an extreme example of our team's general
inability to intimidate the opposition. The other team's
dugout needed a shave; ours needed, at most, a bath. (Some
unwritten rule in male adolescence dictates that the lower
your parents' tax bracket, the sooner you acquire facial
hair.) As I walked out to the mound, their hairy,
well-muscled players danced jigs in their dugout, their
coaches high-fived, their fans celebrated and shouted
lighthearted insults. The game, as far as they were
concerned, was over. I might have been unnerved if I'd paid
them any attention; but I was, at that moment, fixated on the
only deeply frightening thing in the entire ballpark: Coach
Fitz.

By then I had heard (from
the eighth graders, I believe) all the Fitz stories. Billy
Fitzgerald had been one of the best high-school basketball
and baseball players ever seen in New Orleans, and he'd gone
on to play both sports at Tulane University. He'd been a top
draft pick of the Oakland A's. But we never discussed Fitz's
accomplishments. We were far more interested in his
intensity. We heard that when he was in high school, when his
team lost, Fitz refused to board the bus; he walked, in his
catcher's gear, from the ballpark at one end of New Orleans
to his home at the other. Back then he played against another
New Orleans superstar, Rusty Staub. While on second base,
Staub made the mistake of taunting Fitz's pitcher. Fitz raced
out from behind home plate and, in full catcher's gear,
chased a terrified future All-Star around the field. [snip]

And now he was standing on
the pitcher's mound, erupting with a Vesuvian fury, waiting
for me to arrive. When I did, he handed me the ball and said,
in effect, Put it where the sun don't shine. I looked at
their players, hugging and mugging and dancing and jeering.
No, they did not appear to suspect that I was going to put it
anywhere unpleasant. Then Fitz leaned down, put his hand on
my shoulder and, thrusting his face right up to mine, became
as calm as the eye of a storm. It was just him and
me now; we were in this together. I have no idea where the
man's intention ended and his instincts took over, but the
effect of his performance was to say, There's no one I'd
rather have out here in this life-or-death situation. And I
believed him!

As the other team continued
to erupt with joy, Fitz glanced at the runner on third base,
a reedy fellow with an aspiring mustache, and said, ''Pick
him off.'' Then he walked off and left me all alone.

If Zeus had landed on the
pitcher's mound and issued the command, it would have had no
greater effect. The chances of picking a man off third base
are never good, and even worse in a close game, when
everyone's paying attention. But this was Fitz talking, and I
can still recall, 30 years later, the sensation he created in
me. I didn't have words for it then, but I do now: I am about
to show the world, and myself, what I can do.

At the time, this was a
wholly novel thought for me. I'd spent the previous school
year racking up C-minuses, picking fights with teachers and
thinking up new ways to waste my time on earth. Worst of all,
I had the most admirable, loving parents on whom I could
plausibly blame nothing. What was wrong with me? I didn't
know. To say I was confused would be to put it kindly;
''inert'' would be closer to the truth. In the three years
before I met Coach Fitz, the only task for which I exhibited
any enthusiasm was sneaking out of the house at 2 in the
morning to rip hood ornaments off cars -- you needed a
hacksaw and two full nights to cut the winged medallion off a
Bentley. Now this fantastically persuasive man was insisting,
however improbably, that I might be some other kind of
person. A hero.

The kid with the fuzz on
his upper lip bounced crazily off third base, oblivious to
the fact that he represented a new solution to an adolescent
life crisis. I flipped the ball to the third baseman, and it
was in his glove before the kid knew what happened. The kid
just flopped around in the dirt as the third baseman applied
the tag. I struck out the next guy, and we won the game.
Afterward, Coach Fitz called us together for a brief sermon.
Hot with rage at the coach with the rule book -- the ballpark
still felt as if it were about to explode -- he told us all
that there was a quality no one within five miles of this
place even knew about, called ''guts,'' which we all
embodied. He threw me the game ball and said he'd never in
all his life seen such courage on the pitcher's mound. He'd
caught Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers and a lot of other
big-league pitchers -- but who were they?

A core of the Fitzgerald/Williams technique is the bluster is
a smokescreen. At the key moment, if there's a lesson to teach,
the listener is so attuned to trying to make sure he doesn't
displease "the angry father" that he's really
concentrating on acting on the instruction. And because it's said
calmly, it's notably different, an exception, a surprise, and
processed . And he's not forcing Lewis to do something Lewis is
afraid he doesn't do well enough (pitch to the batter), but to do
something else about which he'll have little anxiety, pick off
the runner at 3rd.

The advantages are all to the Newman School team. If it works,
it's a big statistical shift (an extra out and no runner on
third from where it's so probable he'll score), plus it's a
change in momentum and builds the confidence of Lewis. If it
doesn't work and the runner is safe, no loss, and Lewis has a few
more seconds to compose himself.

BEYOND BASEBALL

There will be some employees you just have to bluster at. If
you bluster, though, at mature contributors, the likelihood is
you'll lose part of their loyalty and some of their productivity.
And if you want to ever be mediocre or better as a manager, you
can never allow yourself to actually bluster without knowing that
you're at a level you could turn off in an instant (like
Fitzgerald did on the mound), and placed in context as part of an
overall process.

As Lewis explained later in the article, for his coach,
success was not an event or even a set of events, it was a
process. So while on the outside, Billy Fitzgerald is a dangerous
explosive device, in reality, that is a technique he uses as part
of an overall plan, a process for tuning his charges for the
tasks at hand and later when he won't be right there to make
every decision.

Outside of baseball, all the blustering managers I ever met
had no long-range process design in mind. The closest I ever came
was Ray, the former NYC fire captain who ran the mailroom at a
talent agency I interned at. Ray blustered, but wasn't trying to
intimidate, merely stress how important he thought it all was.
But he had no long-term design.

Do you know any successful Fitzgerald/Williams types beyond
baseball? I'd love to hear any stories; I think they're a very
rare type.

3/28/2004 04:29:00 PM posted by j @ 3/28/2004 04:29:00 PM

Friday, March 26, 2004

When managers meet in a professional way and talk about their
work at big social venues such as workshops, seminars and trade
shows, there's frequently a subtle pecking-order exercise based
on how big or famous the manager's organization is. Bobby
Valentine, compulsive outsider, former journey-guy utilityman
and New York Mets manager, now at the helm of the Japanese
Leagues' Chiba
Lotte Marines has some useful insights in how the effort
invested in pecking-order is effort drawn away from the real job
at hand.

Pecking order overhead has been going on for a long time, but
it's picked up in the last few decades. What Americans have based
it on has changed subtly, too.

In the Eighties, it was annual sales. In the Nineties, when
the Cult of Branding was wilding and stock market ticker symbols
were etched into the public memory with a depth comparable only
to the names and stories of martyr saints during Europe's Dark
Ages, the corporate name recognition of one's employer weighed
heavily in establishing perceived mojo. If you worked for a
better-known company your words seemed to carry more gravitas

The anthropologist in me never failed to be amused when I'd
watch the odd pecking-order dance rituals over institutional
sliced-beef lunches, and observe the particpants trying to figure
out who was more important based on who they worked for, or how
big their budgets were.

There's been an additional factor in this Elizabethan Great
Chain of Being since about 1976, (I think resulting from the
presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter) where as a society we have
been marketed the idea that corporate structures were morally and
functionally superior to non-profit, military and governmental
ones. And that therefore, by some transitive property, the
managers who labored for the corporate employers had some
functional and moral superiority over their peers who worked in
endeavors where profit wasn't the currency. The Cult of Going
Public refined this further; it wasn't enough to work for a
successful for-profit venture, but to really be a chosen one, you
needed to work for a company that traded its ownership in the
form of stock that traded on public markets. In another forty
years or so, that last bit will trigger the kind of amusement and
wonderment with which we view Medieval peasants' worship of minor
saints.

REALITY INTRUDES

As you go about learning your managerial craft, if you keep
your ears and eyes open, you'll find you have every bit as much
to learn from managers who work a small unknown organizations.
Small departments can have big, complex budgets. Big departments
can have lots of bodies but only one simple, relatively
unchanging function they do over and over.

And, of course, the only difference between managing in a
large organization and a small one, is the larger the
organization is, the more effort dedicated to politicking and the
less to managing. And, almost always, the less
innovation desired or possible. Those are powerful gravity
fields, not immutable determinants. But you have at least as much
to learn from managers who work in organizations you don't
recognize from the store or stock ticker as you do from those you
do recognize.

The task of management is no more sophisticated at G.M. than
it is at Department of Agriculture. It's no better done at Pepsi
than at Essential Baking Company.

Valentine is bumping up against this Great Chain of Being
assumption right now. Managing in Japan, he's viewed with the
assumption that he can't wait to manage in the bigs. Yes, in
general the caliber of play in the National League is superior to
that of the Japanese leagues, but that doesn't change the skill
required to manage a team. The game is the same, as are some of
the players.

"I have a job I'm
doing right here that I'm loving and I'm totally into,''
Valentine said. "I do find it insulting for people to
say, 'When are you going to get back to the States?' I get
it, but I find it insulting.

"I am a major-league manager, whether people think that
or not, because of their closed- mindedness. We stay in the
finest hotels. We play before 40,000. We have guys that throw
96 mph that have splits and guys run down to first base and
hit home runs as well as anyone in the world. Because they
don't want to appreciate it, understand it or admit to it, I
don't care.''

[snip]Valentine is back in business here, working from sunup
to sundown.

"I like the challenge of a new team, of learning the
talent and putting it in the right places,'' he said. "I
like the language thing. I like learning to drive on the
left-hand side of the road. I like all of those things.''

Valentine just gets it. (He always did,
btw.When he was a utility infielder for the Seattle Mariners, he
was one of the more interesting interviews you could get. There
were rare excuses to actually talk to him, but it was always a
pleasure, because he was open-minded and opinionated and fairly
well-spoken.) It's not the size or brand-recognition of
the organization that makes for advancement, it's challenge,
coping with changes, managing differences, that build up your
toolkit of abilities.

Be open to perspectives of managers in different kinds of
organizations, remember that while their challenges might not be
as public, or as likely to make Baseball Tonight or The Nightly
Business Report or C-Span, those challenges might be tougher, or
of more use to you. Bobby Valentine knows that.

3/26/2004 07:56:00 AM posted by j @ 3/26/2004 07:56:00 AM

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Minimizing Talent: Lou Piniella, Jesus Colome &Learning When an Experiment is Over

Earl Weaver was the master at
experimentation, a key factor in his mastery was knowing when to
hold and when to fold, as Kenny
Rogers has been quoted as saying. There's no magic formula in
or outside of baseball, it's intuitive. And even the best can be
wrong, usually tending, when they make a mistake, to make that mistake on
one side of the hold/fold duality.

Knowing when to pull the plug on a failed
Prune-Pepperoni-Peanut Butter Pop-Tart of an experiment is not
one of Lou Piniella's personal strengths. Back when he managed
the Seattle Mariners, Piniella got a wonderful 1994 season out of
reliever Bobby
"Ay-Ay-AYIEE" Ayala, and a special gift it was,
too, worthy of an O. Henry write up. Because while it wasn't
quite as good as the 2.86 ERA indicated it was, the year was highly
functional. And like a Staffordshire Terrier who's caught the car
he was chasing down the street and locked his jaws on the
left-rear Michelin Pilot® Exalto® 195-60h-15 radial, Lou sticks
with his decisions, even when the discomfort of being
flump-flump-whumped on the macadam would have convinced a lesser
Promise-Keeper to release his hold. Piniella let Ayiee's subpar
'95 go by, stood by his man during a sucko '96, rode him to death
during a positive '97. In '98 Lou descended into the Sixth Circle
of Dante's Hell holding on mightily to an Ayala who racked up a
legendary 7.88 run average over 75 event-packed innings of
Mariner baseball.

Lou finally folded. But he didn't exactly learn his lesson. In
1999, he used to regularly let Brian L. Hunter (the
one that can run but hot hit a lick, as opposed to the
one who could hit but not run a lick), who that season
sported a .277 on-base percentage, hit for himself late in games
that were on the line, when he had at least two guys on the bench
(in one game, Edgar Martinez) who could hit notably better. He
stopped doing these past-their-value experiments in Seattle only
when he became the Tamnpa Bay Devil Rays' skipper.

Apparently, he's at it again. This, according to Steven
Goldman, the most-consistently amusing of the well-informed
baseball commentators, in his recent
Pinstriped Bible piece:

EARL WEAVER'S
GUIDE TO NOT PITCHING
On Sunday, in an outing that lasted approximately 80 of our
Earth years, Devil Rays reliever Jesus Colome pitched
two-thirds of an inning against the Yankees, allowing three
hits, two walks, and four earned runs. He also winged Derek
Jeter on the hand. In Colome's last 16 regular season
innings against the Yankees, he has walked 13, allowed 19
hits, and six home runs.

There is
nothing left for Lou Piniella to explore in the
Colome-Yankees relationship, and both pitcher and his team
would be well-served if he never again faced New York. It's
rare that a prohibition on a match-up is strictly enforced by
a manager, but it has happened. On September 15, 1986, Don
Mattingly hit a game-winning home run off of Baltimore
bullpen ace Don Aase. It was the second time Mattingly had
done that to Aase in less than a year. To that point in his
career, Mattingly was hitting about .750 against the
reliever. After the game, Orioles manager Earl Weaver said
that Aase would never pitch to Mattingly again, not even to
intentionally walk him.

Discretion,
Shakespeare wrote, is the better part of valor.

We all come to the management table with strengths and
weaknesses. Some of the weaknesses are harder to lose than
others. Usually these won't be the drop-dead obvious
ones, I've found in coaching managers, because when failure is
complete, or the results consistently hurt (flump-flump-whump),
it's easier to shed them. Usually it's the ones that don't
guarantee failure so often that are hard to shed. A World War I
French cavalry charge into entrenched German machine guns or
rolling out Bobby Ayala is an easier mistake not
to repeat than calling for a sacrifice bunt (usually
net-negative, but in the right situation is a great move).

To become an acceptable manager, you need to learn from your
mistakes. Not overlearn (that is, refuse to ever again
consider anyhting like what you did before), but flexibly reject
moves you recognize from past failures. In subjecting Jesus
Colome to all the stations of the cross, and then cycling him
through it again, Piniella is re-living the failures of his past.

Flump-Flump-WHUMP.

3/24/2004 07:12:00 AM posted by j @ 3/24/2004 07:12:00 AM

Monday, March 22, 2004

The Adaptive Wisdom of Jim Colborn,Dodger Pitching Guru

There are managers who know how to
inspire beautifully...who then fail to inspire.

If a manager comes to the task of
coaching or working with a staffer armed with a single perfect
approach, he might succeed, he might fail. When I was a young
manager, I had incredibly powerful success with certain kinds of
people -- people who wanted to do a good job and to do that were
willing both to learn and to teach me, too. When I hired, I
mostly hired those types because I just thought they "were
the best". This approach helped make me a good manager, that
combined with finding it easy to tolerate a wide range of
approaches to getting things done.

But there were many assignments I had as
a consultant, and a few as an in-house supervisor where I found
people in place who simply had to have their butts kicked to
perform. In my prejudiced way, I considered people you needed to
manage that way inferior, and as far as being immediately useful
in a group I ran, they did seem that way. But that was my fault.
Because I get much less pleasure kicking someone's butt than
teaching and learning, I missed the fact that many of these types
could be important & prolific contributors if, instead of
giving them what I thought was virtuous, I gave them what they
needed to kick-start them.

My single "perfect" approach
only worked when I got to hire everyone. I learned from Earl
Weaver that to be a great manager, one had to learn to squeeze
the most out of everyone. You treat them equally (don't play favorites or grant special privileges without the most extraordinary of exceptions), but at the same time, treat them as individuals. That was a Weaver standard operating guideline.

People are different in what inspires
them to give their utmost and a great manager has to be sensitive
to what each individual's motivators are and keep a range of
behavioral tools at her side to apply the best one for each
staffer. I still believe in my gut that people who need their
butt kicked to achieve are somehow less healthy than the people
who are my preferred type -- I just understand that in the
workplace, they can contribute equally if they are managed
to their own pattern instead of mine.

Balance is the hard part, because you
need to treat everyone equally, but at the same time, with a
different set of things you do to help, and with a different set
of motivators (what I call "currencies").

BASEBALL'S THE FRESNEL LENS

In baseball, this is transparently clear
because it focuses a lot of light on the way things are set up.
If you're a pitching coach, you're going to be coaching
right-handed pitchers and left-handed pitchers, and these don't
have mirror-image mechanics. Even if you were an accomplished
pitcher, unless you were Tony "The Apollo Of The Box" Mullane, who
pitched from both sides, a significant percentage of your charges
will throw from the side you didn't. And pitchers fall into about
nine basic patterns, so even if you were a very accomplished
pitcher with a long career, you would only have applied two or
three of them at most (hurlers with long careers usually make a
shift when they get older and their fastball is not an
overpowering weapon by itself, so they start using one of the
other patterns).

Dodger pitching coach Jim Colborn
apparently knew this intuitively, and it's helping his
organization both in producing better talents in his young
pitchers, but also in attracting attention from the kind of
pitchers who are looking to learn. This profile from MLB.COM, referenced by
Baseball Primer, interviewed many of Colborn's charges.

It isn't that he mentored a
Cy Young Award winner, although that's pretty cool on the
resume.

Jim Colborn said he knows
something special is happening with his career when he hears
a journeyman pitcher like Eric Knott explain why -- despite
knowing he has virtually no chance of making the Dodgers'
loaded Major League pitching staff -- he signed with the
organization anyway.

"I probably had a
better shot making other clubs, but I was wondering if there
was something over here, something they were teaching guys
that would make me better," said Knott, who now faces
knee surgery. "I see things going on here working for
everybody. I want to tap into that. I wanted to know what the
secret was. I was intrigued. Now I see the way Colborn
teaches. That had a big influence on my decision."

Rick White, another roster
candidate who has made seven other Major League stops, felt
the same. "This guy must have a good idea if everybody
pitches well," said White. "It's like nobody ever
struggles. It just doesn't happen when the whole staff is
good. He knows what he's doing." [snip]

That word is getting
around, the way it did with Ray Miller and Dave Duncan and
Leo Mazzone, with the legacy of Dodger pitching coaches from
Red Adams to Ron Perranoski to Dave Wallace. Colborn has
become a pitching guru. They come from far and wide seeking
his counsel. Young and old, star and scuffler. He's not too
technical, not too theoretical. He's everyman's pitching
coach. [snip]

."He's a great teacher
and a great motivator," said (last year's Cy Young award
winner, Eric) Gagne. "He's a weirdo, in a good way. He
has a dry sense of humor. He doesn't take anything too
seriously. There's so much failure in this game, you need to
be around people who can handle it. He keeps everybody loose
and relaxed. He's not yelling, he's not acting crazy. He's
good for young guys and old guys. He shows you the path.

"For a young kid,
there's a lot of pressure up here. Colby jokes, even if you
fail. We're human. It's OK. His strength is that
there isn't just one way to do it."

"We have a tolerance
for idiosyncrasies that some might find irritating,"
said Colborn. "We appreciate the bizarre. One reason for
our success is that we have an attitude that is supportive of
individuals, guys like (Kevin) Brown and (Jose) Lima."
[snip]

He treats (the
pitchers) equally, yet individually. He offers
suggestions, but not too many. "He's got the ability to
make it easy," said Alvarez. "Some coaches say
you've got to do it their way and they make you think. His
way is simple and that way you don't think too much. You just
do it. When some guys get technical you just get
confused."

"I say as little as
possible and make sure to say it one way as simply as I
can," he (Colborn) said. "If you have a golf coach
give you a tip, it might take you 10 swings before you get
it. If he gives you a new tip every two or three swings, you
overload. Trust that they are good at it. Give them a tip and
let them master it."

In short, you need to learn the adaptive wisdom of Jim
Colborn. Great management is not about forcing people to conform
to some ideal form you design to. Yes, you need standards, but
equally, to deliver the highest vlue from each staffer, form each
moment, from each decision, you need to adapt to individuals'
needs and what motivates them.

Procrustes
never would have succeeded as a major league pitching coach.
Neither did Stan
Williams. All his grit and wisdom was wasted as a pitching
coach because it didn't flex to meet the individuality of his
charges.

Colborn had some advantages. His career was fairly long (8
real seasons), and he got to pitch as a starter and as a reliever
in both leagues, as well as having some years he was considered
successful (20 game winner in 1973, in 1977 he threw a
no-hitter), and some years that were far from it (in 1976, he was
9-15, and in 1978 was 3-10 with a putrid 5.24 ERA). He got a wide
perspective which seems to be a foundation for teahcing multiple
ways of working.

Be like Colborn. Learn not only to recognize differences, but
to embrace them as a tool for maximizing your organization's
returns from staff skills and attitudes.

3/22/2004 05:58:00 AM posted by j @ 3/22/2004 05:58:00 AM

Saturday, March 20, 2004

The Lessons of Brady Anderson's Magnum Opus

I once hit .583 for a season in a recreational league.
Granted, it was one of those 1887 Tip
O'Neill flukes. Only 21 games, there were no walks and you
couldn't strike out on a foul ball (a rule I hate that's in so many rec leagues), so
I could foul off five or six pitches waiting for one I really
liked. But I had this extraordinary combination of seeing the
ball really well, being very comfortable at the plate and
incredible luck that allowed a fair number of line drives to just
miss outstretched gloves. Everything just lined up that season.

So when Brady Anderson, a fairly good but ordinary player who
had one breathtaking outlier of a year, gets accused of using
illegal substances simply because that year is so many standard
deviations from his norm, I 'm confident that the accusation is
just whingeing from a bunch of people who don't get the point.
But so you understand, here's Anderson's the part of playing
record including The Year, and the five years before and after:

In the new tabloid fascination with supplements legal and
illegal, Anderson's 1996 Magnum Opus has been mentioned as a
strong candidate for being an indication of steroid use. This
kind of thinking is so far off base, I'm not sure it qualifies as
actual thinking. The Baltimore
Sun ran an article, "Anderson defends his '96 power
trip", that lets Anderson talk about his season, and how it
fits into his career.

"Because I only hit 50
home runs once, it was, in fact, an aberration. However, it
was not a fluke," he told The Sun yesterday.
"Nothing can be considered a fluke that takes six months
to accomplish. Rather it was a culmination of all my
athleticism and baseball skills and years of training peaking
simultaneously. This was my athletic opus.

"I have been alternately amused and perplexed by
Palmer's vacillating comments over the last few days,"
said Anderson, who is raising his daughter with her mother,
Sonia Vassi. "I did not respond initially because I
sensed he knew he had made a mistake and thought it fair to
let him rectify the matter on his own.

"Perhaps what offended me the most was his comment that
he knows how hard I trained. How could he possibly know that?
Pushing myself to become a better athlete was truly my
passion and still is. Many people don't possess the desire to
test the limits of what the body and mind can accomplish, and
others I'm certain possess the desire but lack the expertise
to achieve the desired results."

Anderson never hit more than 21 homers before 1996, and
didn't eclipse 24 after '96.

"I know what I accomplished, am proud of it, and know
that it was done with integrity," he said. "I'll
state this once again: It was 26 more home runs than I hit in
any other season, but that's just one more home run per week,
just one more good swing. That is the data that
simultaneously comforted me and haunted me, the small
difference between greatness and mediocrity."

Anderson usually kept a container of Creatine in his locker,
but the supplement, which serves as an energy reserve in
muscle cells, is legal. "That's here to stay. It's a
legitimate substance. It's found in food," he said.
"Taken properly, it can be very beneficial. But it
doesn't replace skill or training."

Anderson, who was tested for steroids in the minors last
year, said he has received dozens of calls from friends and
former teammates since Palmer's remarks made it into print,
many of them outraged or confused by the implications. They
remember Anderson as a man obsessed with physical fitness,
someone whose training methods were seen as outrageous for a
baseball player. They remember him working out privately on
the back fields at Fort Lauderdale Stadium, where he would
squat 200 pounds while balancing on an exercise ball.

They also observed how his weight never fluctuated much, that
his muscular build was the same four years before he hit 50
homers - as evidenced by a poster of him, shirtless, that was
a popular sell in Baltimore. They didn't see the violent
outbursts common with steroid abusers. [snip] Players used to
tease Anderson for bringing his own blender into the
clubhouse, unfamiliar with the concoctions he chugged before
or after games. Said Ripken: "Now protein mixes are an
acceptable part of everyone's diet. Brady always had a much
more advanced concept of cross-training and plyometrics and
his diet. He was just ahead of the curve."

His timing on fastballs was impeccable in '96. "To me,
it was all about him being locked in. He had good swings
every at-bat. Bearing witness to it all year, he was a marvel
to watch. I don't remember him ever being in a slump,"
Ripken said.

"Brady always had a fly-ball swing, which he was
criticized for as a leadoff hitter, but that year he was
right on the ball. He was just in one of those grooves. There
were a couple of instances in my career when I seemed to pick
up the next day where I left off. It's hard to explain. You
wish you could do that every year."

Said Anderson: "The thing that stands out about '96 is,
it's not my size, it's my swing. If anyone wants to compare
what changed about me, my swing was so much better that year.
I couldn't match it, and I don't know why. Later in my
career, I was trying to imitate myself. I had a swing that
any hitter would have been proud of. The other years, I used
to just battle [hard] and be athletic."

If one thinks Anderson took steroids, the
arguer would have to answer some simple questions

#1: If he was on steroids before 1996, why were his stats so
ordinary?

#2: If he was on {steroids | whatever} in 1996, why is the
shape of his stat line the way it is? It's not one single
thing...that is, it's clear he was taking a different approach
and benfitted. He had 22 HBPs, over twice his typical dram,
meaning he was working the plate differently. He ha a lower walk
rate and lower strikeout rate and more hits, meaning he was
putting the ball in play some more. His RBIs (excluding the ones
he got scoring on his own homers) went up 25% while his hits went
up 19%, meaning he probably had far more plate appearances with
men on base (which provides an additional advantage to a hitter
who is facing a pitcher who is more likely to be ineffective or
whose attention is divided to some degree, or both).

#3. If he was on {steroids | whatever} in 1996, why is his
1997 stat line so normal for his career in most ways, while still
reflecting the approach of the unusual 1996 year? There was no
giant tabloid supplements witch-hunt. He didn't injure himself
(he played two more games that next season than he had the year
before). Competitive people can usually be counted on to keep
doing what they are asuccessful at and for which they recieved
recognition. If he was taking steroids in 1996, why would he
stop?

The suspicion is unavoidable that Brady Anderson just had his
Magnum Opus in 1996, a year when everything went just right, he
had some extra luck, some extra tranquillity. some extra soupçon
of consistent muscle coordination. And that it was combined with
a different approach of crowding the plate to avoid being jammed
too often, and that pitchers didn't, as a composite,
adapt too well during that season, to his changes, adapting only
later.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Outside of baseball, managers experience this alignment of the
planets occasionally. It's important to remember this in
evaluating performance in in managing your own expectations of
people and strategies.

Just as many Orioles fans were disappointed with Anderson, a
C+ ballplayer for most of his career who had an A+ year, it's
possible to be "disappointed" with the perfomance of
staff or managers who are good, and who then do something great
when they're locked in or get the perfect situation in which to
prove themselves. These zones don't usually last very long in
dynamic systems. The odds are, they will regress to their range
of normal. That's true when they suddenly fail as sharply in the
other direction.

While individuals get hurt by this spearation between reality
and expectations, organizational strategies can hurt a lot more.
Decent one-year results based on a specific strategy can be the
early recongition of a sea-change, or just an Anderson-like
change of approach that works for a while, and perhaps benefits
from a little fortuitous smattering of co-factors or indepedent
events that play into the direction of the strategy. And in the
case where it's a Brady Anderson 1996 (a fine outlier where
everything just came into synch at the same time), organizations
can go nuts and refuse to adapt their approach, sticking to the
expectation that somehow, that outlier was normal.

Do you see this in your own organization? Perhaps behaviors
that unfairly criticize individuals for living in their 99th
percentile all the time? Perhaps strategies that see past results
as rules writ in stone? Or like Brady Anderson, can your
organization stay as sharp as it can and not let expectations
blitz reality and face the immutable fact that sometimes,
everything comes together for a contributor or a strategy, and
just see that as a positive, useful-when-it-happened blip.

3/20/2004 01:29:00 PM posted by j @ 3/20/2004 01:29:00 PM

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

A frequent bad management trick is to unconsciously or
intentionally make someone go though some hazard course that the
manager had to go through when he was just a player. This lack of
self-awareness and self-examination (third base in the MBB model) It happens in baseball and in
non-baseball organizations alike. But in baseball, it's drop-dead
obvious.

Baseball Primer is running a team-by-team scouting report and
a few days ago, they carried Mike Emeigh's summary of the Pittsburgh Pirates'
prospects for the pursuit of the pennant. If you're not
familiar with his work, it's really special; he's numerically
sophisticated, but his studies grip context and shading better
than just about any of the other exxxxtreme math guys'.

Emeigh wrote about a young Pirate player of promise, Craig
Wilson, his performance (which is good) and his prospects for
playing time (which aren't very good).

Craig Wilson, over the
course of his major league career, has hit .322/.414/.595
against left-handed pitching, and .249/.340/.450 against
right-handed pitching. Those RHP stats, by the way, are not
much different than [his
left-handed hitting platoon partner at first base] Randall Simons splits against
RHP over the last three years (.302/.332/.466), although
Wilsons OBP is inflated to some extent by 35 HBP vs
RHP, which nearly matches his walk total (46). Unfortunately,
the Pirates also see Wilsons relatively high strikeout
numbers against RHP (about 1 every 3.5 PAs) and look at him
as a liability against RHP. The "Free Craig Wilson"
movement is in full swing, but its not going to happen
in Pittsburgh; Wilson is going to be a backup catcher,
platoon 1B with Simon, and OF starter when Mondesi or Jason
Bay need a rest. As Lloyd McClendon is fond of saying, Wilson
will get his 300 PAs he should be getting more, but the
Pirates probably wont give it to him.

Craig
Wilson (not to be confused with Buc SS Jack Wilson)
is popular among many sabermetric enthusiasts. He has some power
in his bat and has figured out how to get on base enough that his
on-base percentage is net-positive, too. Plus he's young enough
that if he played regularly, he might have some noticeable chance
to be better. He had the highest offensive production rate (OPS+
of 125) of any 2003 Pirate still on the team. As of yesterday, he
was having an acceptable Spring, statistically, anyway:

That's a small sample slugging percentage of .929. On defense,
he plays right field (just about well enough to be called
adequate, but he doesn't get enough playing time so that you
could really judge his full potential), first base (just about
well enough to be called adequate, but he doesn't get enough
playing time so that you could really judge his full potential),
and catcher (just about enough....yes, you get it already).

And this is frustrating to Iron City fans who wish he'd get a
proper chance. As a right-handed platoon partner, he's going to
start in the roughly 3/8ths of the games where opponents start a
left-handed pitcher. He's going to move around the field as a
sub, and never get established in a position (which conceivably
could help his hitting a little, because if he is a
barely-adequate fielder as the numbers make it look like he is,
he'll not be given a chance to master any position to the point
that he's clearly-adequate, and this will probably draw some of
his attention away from his batting.

It seems like a sad waste of potential letting a guy who might
be the team's best hitter wallow on the bench while manager Lloyd
McClendon injects an exaltation of sabermetrically unpopular
players into the lineup. IfCraig Wilson could
help the small market, and long-term struggling Pirates, no one
will ever know.

DUDE, WHERE'S MY IRONY

Here's the odd thing, and I think it's not a coincidence: When
Lloyd McClendon played, he was the Craig Wilson of his
time. Not quite as good a player, but Wilson is a
right-handed hitter who kills left-handed pitching and plays
corner outfield, first base and catcher. McClendon
was a right-handed hitter who killed left-handed pitching and
played corner outfield, first base and catcher, and McClendon
never really had the opportunity to start regularly. Even when he
was putting up All-Star quality numbers, he never put up
All-Star quality numbers because he got used as a
platoon partner and occasional sub. Look at McClendon's career;
it's hauntingly similar (not exactly the same: the manager's
playing career started later, and his really good years were
punctuated with poor ones).

But McClendon was the Pirates' lefty-killer sub extraordinaire
of his day, and the way then-Pirate manager Jim Leyland used him
is the way it appears he's insisting on using C. Wilson. In his
two best years, 1989 and 1991, he was used for 200-350 plate
appearances, and annihilated lefty pitching (numbers courtesy of
Dr. Grant Sterling, philosopher, baseball researcher, Tolkien
scholar, commissioner).:

McClendon's 1989 had splits much like the numbers Emeigh cites
in the section I reprinted above. Great against lefties, about
league average against righties.

I believe Lloyd McClendon is doing one of three things.

Possibility #1: He's intentionally making Craig Wilson relive
the manager's own career limits (McClendon didn't do well enough
against right-handed pitchers -- as in the 1989 example here --
to benefit his team, but on the other hand, it wasn't like he
ever was given a great chance to play enough against righties to
succeed or fail clearly). I call this a management hazing ritual
-- sort of "I had to suffer through it all, and now you will
to". Awful, but possible..

Possibility #2: He's intentionally using Wilson the way he was
used because he falsely believes Wilson really is his
doppelganger, that is, without any malice at all, he has come to
believe that he himself never could have achieved more, that when
he was effective, he was being spotted as a lefty-killer, and
he's protecting Wilson's ego and career by using Wilson the way
Leyland used him. Sad, maybe even right, but not good management.

Possibility #3: He's unintentionally using Wilson the way he
was used; he doesn't even realize why. Really awful management.

Wilson is truly trapped in the Olde
Frothingslosh hangover of McClendon's playing career. He's
inexpensive enough to keep around as a bench player (last year's
salary was $327,000), and at 300 plate appearances, will not
likely rack up enough playing time to harvest big enough numbers
to be able to sell himself as an expensive free agent, which may
have him hanging on in this existential job description. And like
Olde
Frothingslosh (The Pale Stale Ale With The Foam On The
Bottom), Wilson is a real product whose career may be short-lived
and a source of bitter humor later on.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Outside of baseball, you see these managerial behaviors (all
three of the possibilities I mentioned). This is actually one of
the rare management failures that's as prevalent in small
organizations as large ones.

Sometimes it's intentional.

As a college work-study job, I worked as an "agent
trainee" at William Morris, a leading talent agency, in New
York. It was the beginning of the career path that virtually
everyone in the company had shared. The actual work was mail-room
clerk, substitute receptionist, foot messenger, go-fer. And
occasionally, you got to ask one of the agents a question or
share an idea with him or her. And I once got to deliver a fat
manila envelope to Melina Mercouri herself, which I thought was
cool.

More than anything else, it was a total hazing experience.
Like older boys in a British boarding school, many successful
agents who survived this system suffered emotional damage during
their years of endurance. They came to believe that the hazing
they received was an important part of their training (after all,
why would they have chosen to endure it rather than leaving -- a
subtle logic trap). So they abused the agent trainees the way
they had been abused.

Sometimes it's unintentional.

That's especially prevalent in American management. Because
management itself is not seen as a profession in this country,
but merely something gets promoted into for no (or vaguely)
related reasons, American managers tend to just imitate managers
they've had themselves (who, in turn, probably developed their
managerial behavior portfolio the same way). If one does this
consciously and with a rigorous and systematic approach, it's a
wonderful short-cut to adequacy. But if one does this as a last
resort, merely imprinting on a previous supervisor as "this
must be a template for the way I'm supposed to act", it
almost guarantees failure. Since 85% of all managers (business,
government, military, non-profit) are mediocrity or crap, 85% of
the people who one imitates are mediocrity or crap. (Actually,
closer to 80%; 5% are so awful, they out themselves to their
mediocre supervisors, who can't help but notice and actually do
something about it).

My wife had a supervisor, let's call him "Vern
Rapp", a very fine line worker, who was promoted to
supervisor in social services unit. He was an English major, a
cool guy, but w/zero management training. Without realizing it,
he used his own father as a template for what an authority figure
should do, and conflating "authority figure" with
"manager" was the first howler of a mistake. Authority
figure merely rule, and play off competing factions to maintain
authority, while managers have to actually deliver results.

Vern Rapp's father was an overbearing, dictatorial man who
protected his authority by maintaining secrecy. His decisions and
instructions were delivered without explanation, without context.
He maintained his authority by keeping family members on edge,
uncertain, and concerned about their standing by never
praising-when-merited, only criticizing-when-merited. Rapp's dad
wasn't just a Falangist scumbag -- he had some good attributes,
too. That secrecy, for example, meant that the family didn't know
about every challenge they faced because he'd just take care of
it. And he'd defend any family member to the death against anyone
not inside the family.

So when Rapp became a supervisor late in life with no
training, he managed his unit the same way. And this worked to a
large degree as an authority figure. He won the loyalty of his
staff because he would defend them to the death when they messed
up, which they did more often than they should have because he
wasn't managing them properly or teaching by example or helping
the weaker individuals build up skills. His portfolio of
managerial behaviors was constrained to his dad's.

OLDE FROTHINGSLOSH HANGOVER

I'm not promising McClendon is actually hazing C. Wilson, I
don't have secret insight into his thinking/feeling process. But
the parallels are so close it's breathtaking. This Scotsman would
bet you a nickel he's right.

Monday, March 15, 2004

Blogging on Five Day's Rest

This is going to be a very slow week for entries. Between work-related travel, trying to finish a particularly dense chapter of the book and journeying to play in a tournament, my work schedule is killer.

Probably won't have time to post something worthwhile until Thursday. Until then, invest your time in spring training boxscores. Don't waste any time on the made-for-tv-quality movie Secret Window. I think David Koepp must be the Larry Burright of directors. Let's hope his career is just as short.

3/15/2004 06:46:00 AM posted by j @ 3/15/2004 06:46:00 AM

Saturday, March 13, 2004

The Cubs, the Red Sox, and Nowthe Rangers: Comfort is the Enemy

If a nation
values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom.
The irony of it is that if it is money or comfort it values more,
it is destined to lose that, too. -- W. Somerset Maugham (1941)

Comfort is the greatest enemy of successful organizations.

That's understandable. "If it ain't broke don't fix
it" is not only a pandemic nostrum, it makes some
practical sense, and that makes it more dangerous when fixing is
necessary. It's always easier, extremely-so in larger
organizations, to just do whatever they do the way they already
do it. So success breeds comfort with the status quo in
process and strategy, that in turn creates an inertia field.

The irony of it is that comfort with the process and strategy
status quo also affects unsuccessful organizations, and
the larger they are, the more likely they are to be trapped by it
until there's a resulting cataclysm. Amazing, or as Vizzini says
in The Princess
Bride, "It's INCONCEIVABLE".

But conceivable it is, and there are wonderful examples in
baseball that illustrate the process. For decades, the poster
children for the odd recombinant mix of comfort and lack of
success were the Chicago Cubs
and the Boston
Red Sox. What the teams shared were home stadia that
significantly enhanced the probability of certain kinds of
offensive events over a long season, that, in turn, created
distorted batting and pitching stats for many team players and
the team as a whole. So when the teams failed to achieve as
highly as they thought they should, management looked at the
numbers, underestimated (or perhaps even ignored) the way the
context of home stadium factors distorted "reality" as
measured by the statistics, and then got comfortable with what
they should have been uncomfortable with.

According to Anthony Giacalone's Looking
Forward to 2004: Texas Rangers team overview in Baseball
Primer, the Texas Rangers are following this pattern, this
amazing, counter-intuitive Bizarro-Superman World weirdness. As
Giacalone writes in this really informative piece (read the whole thing for an insightful analysis of the entire Ranger roster):

Bill James once wrote that
we need to start with two premises when dealing with parks
like The Ballpark at Arlington, or like Wrigley and Fenway
used to be: one, these parks distort the records of their
players, which is generally known but universally
underestimated, and two, teams that play in these parks pay
for believing everything which is not true. "Park
illusions," James elaborated several years later,
"create unequal and misplaced pressures upon teams and
players, which in the long run yield results which are
precisely opposed to the characteristics of the park." A
team like the Rangers, which plays in a great hitters
park, will always score runs no matter how good their offense
is. So, over a period of years they will not address their
offensive needs, allowing their offense to slip into
mediocrity. Conversely, their mediocre pitchers, who might
put up league average ERA in another park will tend to have
an ERA in the 5.00s in Arlington and will quickly be
replaced. [snip]

The conventional wisdom
about the Rangers, even among stat-friendly analysts,
indicates that we havent come very far in the last
quarter century. The Rangers were fifth in the league in runs
scored in 2003, better than two playoff teams. However, their
pitching was dreadful  dead last and a quarter of a run
worse than the next worst staff. Ask any sportswriter,
babbling SportsRadio pundit or bantering head on SportsTV and
theyll tell you that the Rangers cant win because
they have no pitching. Which is true, but only to an
extent. The Rangers cant win because
they cant pitch AND they cant hit. In
2003 Rangers hit .246/.316/.405 on the road; in 2002,
.254/.319/.416. That, my friends, is a bad offense,
thirteenth in the AL in runs scored on the road in 2003 and
better than only Detroits.

[snip] the point has
everything to do with players like Shane Spencer
(.176/.300/.255 on the road in 2003), Juan Gonzalez
(.257/.307/.379 on the road in 2002) and Andres Galarraga
(.221/.296/.377 in 2001 road games). The Ballpark at
Arlington masks some really bad older players and allows them
to muck up an offense for years. But worse for a team is the
effect that a park like Arlingtons has on the
evaluation of young players. Heres an example. Michael
Young may or may not end up being a good player, but the
Rangers seem to think that he will and are talking about
giving him a five-year contract extension. Why? On the
surface he seems like a nice player. After all, he hit .303
with 14 homers last year. Unfortunately, those numbers are
mostly an illusion, a refraction of his real talent viewed
through the distorting prism of a offense-oriented home park.
In his three big league seasons, Young has hit
.227/.263/.345, .245/.287/.359 and .262/.291/.367. [snip]
Hank Blalock hit below .190 on the road in 2002 and
.262/.301/.435 while away in 2003. Last year Teixeira hit
.217/.303/.343 on the road; Laynce Nix, .189/.223/.300. See?
This park makes things very confusing. Everyone you know
thinks that Teixeira and Blalock are cant miss guys,
but their road numbers are butt-awful.

[snip] And the pitching
would be equally as confusing if the Rangers had any major
league capable starters right now. Doug Davis, for example,
is no great shakes but he sure was a lot worse in the Rangers
home white that in their road gray. From 2001-2003, Davis
posted a 4.18 road ERA in 209 road innings. Now there might
be a lot of noise in those numbers and the Rangers might have
been swayed by other things, but I cant picture another
team releasing a 27-year old lefthander while he was sporting
a career 4.18 ERA.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Outside of baseball, I see this a lot.

A company struggling because of a weakness they can't see, a
weakness masked by what appears to be success. I consulted to a
high-tech company for a while that had the most incredibly
productive R&D department I've ever seen. The company needed
to change, because while results had been very good for years,
the trajectory was changing, and sales people were having greater
and greater struggles selling to the largest accounts. Because
high-tech companies are driven by responding to or getting ahead
of change, all the change efforts were focused on getting R&D
pointed in the right direction, killing projects viewed as too
creative (that is, seen as risky) and producing what the biggest,
highest-buying customers thought they wanted.

In high-tech, of course, no matter how fast you move, by the
time you actually release a product, the customer has usually
evolved and usually wants something slightly, greatly, or
completely different. R&D was not the problem.

The sales department was the problem. Totally. No one inside
the organization could see this because of the environmental
factors. First, in high-tech when you are successful and then
your sales start to tail off, it's a "safe" assumption
that your technology is no longer serving the market. Second, as
long as the sales are rolling in (as long as the team is scoring
6 runs a game), it doesn't look like sales needs fixing. But the
sales department was a mess masked by high sales volumes. The
department head had a personality disorder. He liked (as
employees) men much better than women. So when an account was
developed by one of the departmental women, he'd transfer it to
one of the men. It created discontinuity in the
relationship-building with the purchasers at the big clients
while undermining the women's ability to make money, and since
most sales people are motivated primarily by money, this tended
to offend the women, who tended to transfer, slack, or leave the
company.

In addition, this sales department had, in spades, a
distortion that is pretty common in sales departments: they
listened too closely to their largest customers and not enough to
their fastest-growing ones. Smaller organizations tend to grow
faster than larger ones, and tend to be far more capable at
absorbing change (in everything, including new technological
approaches). So sales growth is easier to harvest from
smaller, faster-growing companies that larger, higher-current
volume ones. But it's easier for a saleswoman to make her numbers
selling to Chrysler than it
is to Smart
Car (and the same is true for the department as a whole).

Both distortions fried the chicken that came home to roost.

Not only was the sales group not able to take good advantage
of the growth area of the market, it was bringing back feedback
exclusively from a handful of slower-growth customers with whom
they didn't have tight personal relationships (because of the
staff reassignments designed to help politically-favored
appointees). The company was relying on salesfolk for gathering
the information on which to base R&D's direction (tends to be
a mistake, because this always guarantees a bit of
backwards-looking, as opposed to forward-looking, bias). And the
salesfolk gathering this info tended not to have built up a deep
enough relationship with the buyer to get the buyer's most
thoughtful and engaged response.

Comfort can undermine even organizations that aren't really
succeeding, if the comfort is the result of context distortion.
Just as the Cubs, the Red Sox, and the Rangers.

3/13/2004 09:02:00 AM posted by j @ 3/13/2004 09:02:00 AM

Friday, March 12, 2004

Schlock-Eyed Optimism RevisitedPushback & Added Insight

On Saturday,
the entry was about MBWT (Management by Wishful Thinking),
& I took The Sporting News to task for having printed a
pre-season overview that suggested 18 teams would improve while
at the same time only 10 would decline. Based on my thinking,
baseball is a zero-sum game, and for every extra win there has to
be an extra loss, so 10 declines wouldn't blanace 18
improvements..

Bruce Adelsohn pushed back on pieces of my logic and his note
has merit (abridged here):

I think your analysis of
the excessively optimistic views of baseball reporters in
springtime is facile, or at least more superficial than your
usual effort. In addition to the three reasons you mention
about why writers would believe a team has improved, there is
the belief that baseball is not a zero-sum game in terms of
talent. While it certainly is recordwise, as you note, there
is a widespread perception that the incoming talent from the
ranks of the minor leagues will more than make up for it. I
believe that it is so, though not to the extent that is
perceived; that is, the level at which the game is played is
increasing annually. (Yes, I can see that as a parallel in
the business world. A business SHOULD aim to improve,
always.)

Also, in your example,
eighteen teams are listed as believed to have improved. This
is likely true on paper; nevertheless, unpredictable events
such as injuries will play some part in determining how many
of those predictions fall short (at least three, unless as
you note some team tanks atrociously). Although baseball GMs
(and reporters) are aware of injuries, most preseason
assessments are not written with them in mind. (I imagine a
good business plan WOULD include contingencies for events
such as loss of key personnel to illness or defection,
though. Such a plan wouldn't necessarily make up the loss
completely, if at all, though it would allow the firm to
continue functioning.)

I wonder if you might
consider addressing an amendment to your last point in more
detail (or if I have missed it, please point out where):
while the lack of quality is not free, quality costs more. Or
does it? (My conclusion: quality might cost more up front,
but, like all good investments, pays for itself over time.).

My response (also abridged) both agreed and disagreed with his
arguments. Mr. Adelsohn is a publishing/layout professional,
which is why you'll see a reference to printers.

I don't disagree, though
I'm inclined to hold to my original point. Let me make a tiny
desktop publishing analogy for a minute. Let's say you own a
600 x 1200 dpi color laser. Your competitors own 2400 x 2400
dpi technology. You buy a new (better resolution) printer
like theirs.

Are you better in the Bruce
sense? Yep, sure. Can you use it to market your service. In
the Jeff sense, nope. You might retain customers you would
have lost otherwise (if they cared about such
specifications), but it's not likely to bring you new
business. You get a bit of a tax break, technically on paper
you're better, but your competitive position isn't improved.

Another point I didn't make
but that re-inforces your side: the overall rolling average
quality improves every season (with blips and exceptions).
The fact is that the quality of ball played on the field goes
up every decade, with the improvement in techniques,
nutrition, a wider pool of potential choices in talent. So
it's technically true that the team is "better",
but in the sense of is it better prepared to win additional
games than last season, the answer may be "no" (as
you noted). I guess my defense of my position is that the
answer "better" was true, BUT TO THE WRONG
QUESTION.

But Adelsohn's point has merit, and is deserving of
consideration in the your own decision-making equations outside
of baseball. Quality is free, as Adelsohn points out, in
the long run (and I'll add, "in compsotite, that is, most of
the time, but not in very case").

ANOTHER DATA POINT -- & A USEFUL
TOOL

Sometimes a single graphic can point out a concept better than
a long discussion, regardless of how precise and intelligent that
discussion is. Mike Gutierrez, Alaska's #1 All-Natural
blogger, sent me a copy of this graphic, which appeared in
the New York Times (warning, the guy who wrote the attached
article is considered controversial; the data shown, however is
official government issue and indisputable). If politics is not
your cup of meat, just look at the graphic
at the top (NYT requires registration) and skip the text
below it.

Gutierrez' comment:

I saw this graphic in
the New York Times and it struck me as a greatly exaggerated
example of Management By Wishful Thinking.

I couldn't agree more -- it's a perfect example. To
many people, MBWT is just a concept. I suggest the graphic Mike
sent is the single best shorthand epiphany I've seen, condensed
into a small space, clearly illustrated.

If you need to be reminded about MBWT yourself or wish to
remind (secretly or otherwise) another manager of his MBWT
tendencies, print out the Times graphic, trim it nicely, and
crazy-glue it to the offender, or pass it out in meetings like a
Dick Tracy Crimestopper to support some of your relentless
realism in the face of MBWT.

3/12/2004 06:15:00 AM posted by j @ 3/12/2004 06:15:00 AM

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

The Reds: Mining the Pre-CambrianStrata for Comparitive Advantage

Nobody goes
there anymore...it's too crowded. -- Yogi Berra

It's the silly season for baseball reporters. Having gotten an
assignment that requires them to get paid to go to a warm climate
and cover baseball, they have almost no actual news to report.

So they make up deals (e.g., Griffey Junior to Seattle -- no way, btw, if he's going anywhere,
he's going to the Yankees who now need a slugger to replace Gary
Sheffield temporarily and someone who can can play center field
while contributing with the glove and bat, which Junior will do
wherever he plays until he gets injured; yeah, I know about
Junior's animosity towards the franchise, but it'll be a
rent-a-player situation...he won't be there that long and the
cash the Red'll get back will enable them to keep him around once
the Yanks ship him back). They paraphrase the article they
wrote about bats last Spring. They obsess about nutritional
supplements. They write big-think pieces, trying to apply
small-think brains besotted with sun.

When we're lucky, they write
about anything unexpected, as Paul Daugherty of the
Cincinnati Enquirer did today (thanks, Baseball Primer & the
inimitable Repoz). Reds batting coach Chris
Chambliss, a great situational hitter in his day, is faced
with a team that last season didn't just lead the league in
strikeouts, but blew away the field, whiffing 27% more than the
rest of the league.Understand, as a composite, strikeouts are not
instrinsically worse than any other kind of outs...within limits.
And especially when combined with a lot of walks as an offensive
approach, can expose the weak underbelly of some teams' middle
relief corps by probabalistically ginning-up a better chance of
wearing out starters with the extra effort strikeouts and walks
entail. But the Redlegs were 11th in walks, trailing the rest of
the league with 3% fewer free passes. Any ingredient in the
recipe that's way out of context upsets the balance, and this
very very high strikeout, low-middle walks
strategy is not a sure winner.

So what does Chambliss do? According to Daugherty, he exhumes
the Pre-Cambrian fossil pastime: Pepper. The drill, in case you
haven't seen it, is a game where a batter hits (not slugs) the
ball to a group of players gathered around closely, and when they
snare the hit ball, they throw it back (not really hard, but as
quickly as they can). Digging up abandoned fossils can have value
outside baseball, too, but first let me explain a little more
about pepper. The concept is the hitter is making contact with
balls coming from a myriad of angles and spins, and using the
wrists and arms to react quickly. The fielders and trying to
snare balls hit at them from very close range and that requires
not only quick hands and weight/balance changes, but hones the
ability to predict the direction a ball will take. That's the way
it's supposed to work

Over the last twenty years, and especially since the ball was
juiced for the 1994 season, the incremental value of fielding has
inched down, and as the frequency of power hitting has gone up,
the incremental value of putting a ball in play without a lot of
mustard (that is, a ball you focus on hitting squarely at a
specific angle rather than swinging through with power) has gone
down too. This is true in the composite and in most individual
situations.

There are exceptions though.

The 2003 Cincinnati Reds are the poster child for the
inability to hit situationally (just try and meet the ball on
certain counts like 1-2 or to a lesser degree, 2-2, instead of
taking your most Canseco-like cut) having a different, higher
incremental value than it would for the average team. And a
potential side benefit: Pepper is designed to quicken reaction
for defenders, especially in the infield. The Reds were dead last
in fielding percentage in '03, and fielding percentage is one
small, partial indicator of defensive ability. Baseball
Prospectus' more sophisticated measure, Defensive
Efficiency, rates the '03 Reds as 26th out of 30 teams, that
is, they were execrable.

Pepper, this discarded technique, if there's some physical or
physiological benefit to it, could be an important bit
of comparitive advantage to the Reds, especially since every
other team thinks of it as being as passé as Mondale for
President bumper stickers, and that means any advantages that
accrue to the Reds are not as likely to be diffused to other
teams as quickly.

¿Will it work to diminsih strikeouts enough to bring the team
into some level of balance? ¿Will it improve Reds fielders'
ability to snare and process effectively some additional balls
that would have been hits and convert them into outs? I don't
know. But I do know it's worth dredging up the ancient,
disposed-of past when the situation begs it.

BEYOND BASEBALL

The Chambliss Maneuver, turning something so old that it's
new, works well outside of baseball, too, especially when
well-chosen. And I do insist well-chosen. Just because
it was once useful doesn't mean it still is or even should be.
You have to consider and examine the context: is is extinct
because it was dysfunctional and still is (like some sacrifice
bunts early in games), because it was replaced by soemthing
better and cheaper, or was its extinction merely part of a cycle.

Marketing is filled with examples of efforts that go through
cycles. In high-tech marketing, for example, there was a
tradition of giving away t-shirts, and early in the cycle, that
worked decently, especially if the t-shirts were cool. But then everybody
was giving away t-shirts, and most potential recipients valued
them less, so there was escalation: long-sleeve tees,
sweatshirts, hooded sweatshirts, fleece vests, each costing more
than the previous. So now, no-one gives away t-shirts. I got my
first t-shirt in about three years last month, and in the past
that would have been an incredible yawn. But I actually found
this one useful and attention-getting. It's so Pre-Cambrian, it's
avant garde.

It cycles through commodity prices, too. When long-time
ingredients get replaced with newer ones in manufacture or food
processing, the price of the older one tends to decline until
almost no-one wants to produce it for sale any more. But
frequently, there are a few providers who keep on manufacturing
it out of either stubborness, foolishness or dedication to a
product they know they can make better than anyone else. And I've
had clients who were able to buy a constituent or ingredient they
had switched from years ago because it was too expensive, find
that it's so inexepensive now from lack of demand that it makes
sense to go back to it. And competitors, committed to the
present, forget the (now cheaper) virtue of the extinct.

As as a management consultant, I let tools go that I carried
around for decade, but while I remove them from my toolbox, I
never expunge them from my memory. I periodically go back though
old projects, and review how I worked problems when my tool set
was different. Occasionally, I find one that I retired and
realize it might work for someone I'm working with now.
Sometimes, it's merely habit that keeps us going at things the
way everyone else is, and sometimes it makes sense to pull a
Chambliss Maneuver.

As noted management consultant Yogi Berra might say, It's
so empty, people can go there now.

Saturday, March 06, 2004

April is the
cruellest month, breeding
hopefuls out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull fungoes with spring rain.--T.S. Eliot

In baseball, Management By Wishful Thinking (MBWT) is
seasonal. It spikes in March and April when teams without
regular-season records (all undefeated, having had the counters
set back to zero at the end of the previous year) shoot out of
the dead land.

Trashing all objectivity, most fans pretend the team they root
for is going to improve this coming season. And in March, they
haven't yet been proven wrong, so the succulence of delusion is
almost inescapable . The challenge is fiercely harder for
baseball writers. While fans count on their writers to keep them
informed, are immersed in the American ideal of a free and fair
press, baseball writers this time of year are as informative,
fair and rational as if they'd just taken
a hit off Dennis Hopper's tank in Blue Velvet.

We all know this intuitively, but I can prove it to you
statistically.

The February 16 issue of Sporting News featured a wrap, a Spring
Training Special. Each division got its own page. Each team
got a little info box, and each info box had common categories.
The first category in each was "Better or Worse".

Violating the laws of physics and common sense as well as the
immutable, ultimate consolidated .500 record produced every
season by the majors, the schlock-eyed optimists of the baseball
press predicted that of the thirty teams, 18 (64%) would be
better and 10 (36% worse (with two sitting in the middle).

It's unprecedented. In scanning through Baseball Reference
(not a thorough study, just a half-hour walkthough), I can't find
a year where 64% of the teams improved their records year to
year. It would mean every one of those ten "worse"
teams would have to cherry-pie time like last year's Detriot
Tigers, while the wins would have to be spread very carefully and
balanced between the "better" teams.

¿WHY DOES THIS DELUSIONAL EXCESS
HAPPEN?

There are a few reasons worth noting.

The baseball writers who put a team profile together cover
that team during the year. That gives them three reasons be be
delusional about the team's prospects, or to pretend they are.

#1 - Ego. The writers can't help but want the team to
do well. They are lashed, like Ahab to the Whale, to the team for
seven consecutive months or more, and it's hard to avoid the
dream, substanited or not, that the team will be interesting to
write about and, mor importantly, an important subject. Would you
rather be a beat reporter covering the Yankees or the Rangers?

#2 - The Stockholm Syndrome. Writers spend all this
time with the players, coaches and staff of the team that they
"bond". While they are supposed to be objective, they,
more often than not, become advocates, consciously or
unconsciously rooting for their travel partners.

#3 - Survival Instinct. They are counting on the good
will of front office people, players and coaching staff to
provide them with quotes, news and, sometimes, scoops. Moreover,
their newspapers and radio/TV employers are almost always
counting on the team as a source of advertising and promotion
revenue. If a reporter is ssen as less of a team player than her
peers, she'll be undermined comeptitively, getting many fewer
scoops, incrementally fewer opportunities for interviews. And she
won't win any seasonal gift baskets from her employers, either.
Sometimes a reporter will have high enough standing and a grumpy
enough baseline to rassle with team management or players year
after year (I think Glenn Dickey used to do this), but it's
pretty rare.

Baseball is lucky, though.

These delusions are seasonal. And the results make the
outcomes more accoutnable.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Outside of baseball, you see the same processes. Stockbrokers
who work as "analysts" get so immeresed in the handful
of companies they cover, that they tend to fall in love with them
(reason #2). Like baseball reporters, they count on the covered
companies to keep them informed as quickly as possible, and that
makes them hostage to the subject's good will (reason #3). And
analysts, like reporters, have a vested interest in coming to
believe what they do is important, and that is an incentive to
think the subjects of their analysis are important. And it's not
a far leap in most minds from "important" to
"good"

Historians and biographers have the same gravitational fields
tugging at them. Business intelligence analysts, CIA desk
officers, too. This problem is endemic from government and
business to academia.

There are no ways to eliminate it, though there are ways to
control it.

In the Sporting News case, they could have rotated reporters
so each was writing about a team other than the one they report
on. Stock and intelligence analysts can have rotations, though
you need to find a period that's long enough to gain insight and
expertise but short enough for the cost of delusion to be
moderated. Not much you can do about biographers.

Of course, there's the nudge-nudge-wink-wink strategy of
ignoring what analysts say, or simply deflating it some
proportion to where it seems believable.

In the end, though, organizations that are able to take a
clear-eyed view of their own and others' prospects are at a
strong advantage over the MBWT-infused others, whether it's in building
schedules for project management, designing budgets, or planning
an invasion. Yes, you can just let the same old flabby,
delusional thinking persist and deflate the numbers (to some
degree you've guessed at) and you might get close. But you're
wasting overhead, time, energy, resources, massaging useless
results to get less-useless results.